In the 2013 romantic comedy The F-Word, Daniel Radcliffe (you know him best as Harry Potter) plays Wallace, a Toronto man of the ur-Toronto type. He wears messenger bags. He owns sweaters. He has subway station buttons — King and Spadina — pinned to his pea coat.

Those buttons exist in real life. They’re the popular product of a small, though influential Toronto magazine called Spacing.

Since launching the line 10 years ago, Spacing’s editors say they have sold 500,000 subway buttons. (Former mayor David Miller used to wear his around regularly.) In fact, if you stacked every subway button Spacing ever sold, one on top of the other, you’d end up with a pile nearly as high as seven CN Towers, according to Spacing’s retail director Michael Bulko.

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It’s no surprise then, that an entire wall of Spacing’s new standalone retail store on Richmond Street, just west of the entertainment district, is dedicated to subway buttons and magnets. There’s one of each for every station, even Bessarion, a stop on the Sheppard line that almost nobody uses.

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The retail store, which opens to the public Friday, is at once on trend and a total departure for Spacing. The magazine, founded in 2003 by publisher Matthew Blackett and a small group of like-minded journalists and urban thinkers, has had an online store for almost its entire existence. But stepping offline, into the physical world of retail rents, consignment deals and large-scale sourcing, represents another thing entirely.

It’s a choice that reflects both the evolving reality of the print media world, where it’s harder than ever to make money on ads, and a firm belief by Mr. Blackett and his team in the strength of their own company’s brand. On Thursday, Mr. Blackett and Mr. Bulko sat down with the National Post for an interview about the store. Both men displayed a mix of pre-show nerves and joy, the kind you’d expect from two magazine professionals about to launch a retail boutique in a highly competitive marketplace.

The Spacing Store occupies the slightly sunken first floor of an old brick building just down the street from the Scotiabank Theatre. It features exposed pipes and wooden beams and a slick inside designed by Qanuk Interiors, a local firm that agreed to do the work for a discount. (Mr. Blackett is old friends with one of the founders.)

When Spacing first launched as a magazine, it filled a niche, Mr. Blackett said. At the time, there was no one publication in the city dedicated to urbanist issues, like cycling, urban space and architecture. The Spacing Store, he hopes, will fill a similar void.

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“Toronto doesn’t truly have a city store,” he said. “You travel to cities like New York or Chicago or London or Amsterdam and they have these excellent stores that celebrate the city and they’re not just [selling] tchotchkes.”

There are retailers in Toronto — the Drake General Store, for example — that already target the kind of young-adult urbanists Spacing is after. But most of them have more of a pan-Ontario or pan-Canada feel to their goods, Mr. Blackett believes. The Spacing Store will be much more Toronto-specific. “We have a working motto,” Mr. Blackett said: “No moose and no beaver.”

Spacing, of course, is not the first magazine to launch a branded store. Monocle, a global lifestyle glossy, has boutiques around the world, including one in Toronto. But for Monocle, that kind of play always made sense. The magazine’s brand is, effectively, curated luxury. And from writing about to selling luxury goods is no great leap.

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For Spacing the move into retail isn’t quite as intuitive. The magazine’s first issue was built around an impassioned plea to save urban postering from city bureaucrats. And while Mr. Blackett claims an impressive readership (10,000 visitors a day on the website to go with an average of 10,000 issues sold per print edition), there’s no guarantee those readers will automatically turn into customers. It’s one thing, after all, to read about streetcars. It’s another entirely to want a t-shirt with a streetcar on it.

Still, Mr. Blackett isn’t worried. “I didn’t do any market research with the subway buttons,” he said. “I rely on my instincts and gut for some of this stuff. But we spent a year and a half planning this out.”

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He also has some evidence of existing desire. Spacing ran a pop-up store downtown last year. And demand for their Toronto-themed goods was high.

“When we started the magazine, we didn’t know if anybody would like us,” Mr. Blackett said. “We didn’t really know if there was a market for it, and then all these people came out of the woodwork.”